In my youthful, childless years as a Valley Girl, I never thought I'd be complaining about clothes shopping or tired of malls. What did I know? My motto used to be, "Shop 'til you drop." Well, I have dropped.

Perhaps by the time you read this, clothing manufacturers will have stopped their foolishness and my children will all be wearing comfortable, tasteful
outfits they like.

Alternatively, I will have used the children's clothing fund to escape to a small, seaside Mexican village with a romantic name and muy buenas margaritas. Not that I've every contemplated this. Much.

At least buying clothes for our five-year-old is easy. He's thrilled as long as we dress him as a walking billboard for the Nickolodeon channel. It's our other two children who worry me. I fantasize about hiring a personal shopper for them.

I'll start with our preteen daughter. She wants to be an astronaut. She never much liked playing with dolls or dressing up as a princess, choosing instead to build planetariums and oxygen masks from old shoe boxes and toilet paper rolls. She prefers clothes which are simple and not overly feminine. Easy, right?

Ha! I've searched through racks upon racks of clothes, in store after store, in mall after mall. What I found is pink and purple stuff, decorated with butterflies and hearts, and the newest trend, variations of the "I'm a
pretty and spoiled princess" motto. Don't any clothing designers have daughters like mine, who would rather eat live worms than wear a dress? Are manufacturers stuck in a clothing time warp, thinking it's the 1950s and every girl wants to be Princess Grace? Look what happened to Princess Grace anyway. And Princess Di, for that matter. Where, oh, where can I buy a girl's plain bathrobe without lace, flowers, the color pink, or a "Princesses Rock" slogan?

And then there's our eight-year-old son. Buying clothes for him has never been a problem. Until now. He just graduated from the Sizes 4-7 section to the Sizes 8-14. The shirts now available to him either show skateboarders or terrifying creatures like bloody vampires or Eminem. Our son isn't into skateboards and I'm not encouraging him. I kind of like seeing all his bones in one piece. As for the scary monster shirts, I worry we'll get sued after little kids see them and die of fright.

The easiest solution to our clothes problem is for our family to move to a nudist colony. Without me. But in the winter, I'll send them serapes from Mexico.




Debra Garfinkle, author of STORKY, http://www.dlgarfinkle.com